Russell Horton Chief Executive Officer, FluidOne
Previously
COO, Elite Group,Commercial Director, Daisy
Company
FluidOne provides a range of quality data connectivity services to UK businesses across the construction, hospitality, hotels, professional services and retail sectors. They were backed by Rigby Private Equity until February 2019 when they were bought by Livingbridge.
Search Background
Rigby merged two investment businesses, Fluidata and One Point, in October 2016 to create FluidOne. Erevena was retained to find a CEO to replace Piers Daniell, the serving FluidOne CEO and Founder of Fluidata, as he transitioned into a Chairman role. This was with the ultimate aim of accelerating an exit process, preferably into PE for second stage growth phase.
Requirements
The successful candidate needed intricate market knowledge alongside experience of working in a PE-backed environment, where a company executes quickly. The appetite to replicate previous success in a PE environment was also critical, plus the ability to manage the tail-end of a tricky integration process from a systems, processes, customer and personnel perspective.
Result
After an extensive search, Erevena successfully secured Russell Horton, formerly COO at Elite Group, and a first time CEO, who has an excellent reputation in the industry. As CEO at FluidOne Russell was instrumental in securing an exit to Livingbridge ahead of schedule, for a 13.5x multiple, resulting in a 2.1x times money return in 2 years 5 months for Rigby.
John Taylor
Executive Director, FluidOne
Russ has been a star. He has proved himself through this process, and will be helping Livingbridge fulfil their dreams of the next phase of growth with the business. Needless to say we are very happy and wanted to say thanks for helping get the right person, and I trusted you’d like to know that our recruitment and investment plan worked as we planned.
